Three Colorists, curated by Michael Walls, highlights the work of three artists who have several things in common: they began their professional life as painters; the oeuvre of each importantly involves the role of color; and the work of each is not only labor intensive, but also revealing of a hard-won mastery of the chosen craft.

It’s the last show before we move to our new location at 29 Jay Street! What better w­ay to say goodbye to 38 Water Street than with our 14th annual Labapalooza Festival? This year’s line-up of works-in-progress ranges from the traditional to the irreverent, from the ground breaking to the nostalgic, and from delightful to downright punk-rock.

If theatrical is the question, masterpiece is the answer. Modesty in art is over-rated, as anyone with a Schnabel complex knows, so be prepared for the challenge of ascertaining the significance of what these artists have been cooking up over the past four months. Yes, each can draw, paint, and employ color to bold effect, but that’s of secondary importance (the least we can expect of an artist). What drives these artists is Imagination. Another word for imagination is risk, another word for risk is danger, another word for danger is aesthetics. And aesthetics, as we know, is for the birds. But these artists aint tweeting.

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A unique phenomenon in the U.S. and the world, Left Forum convenes the largest annual conference of a broad spectrum of left and progressive intellectuals, activists, academics, organizations and the interested public. Conference participants come together to engage a wide range of critical perspectives on the world, to discuss differences, commonalities, and alternatives to current predicaments, and to share ideas for understanding and transforming the world. The conference is held each spring in New York City.

They play an eclectic mix influenced by New Orleans brass bands, jug music, southern gospel and hot jazz and feel at home at the Village Vanguard or playing on the street. The band features members New Orleans band the Loose Marbles and alumni of Stephane Wrembel’s Hot Club of NY. With Ben Polcer, Trumpet; Patrick Harison, Accordion; Jared Engel, Banjo; David Langlois, Washboard and Peter Ford, Washtub bass.

It’s that time again! You bring the brains, we bring the beer. This month we are happy to be hosted by our friends @ the 538 Johnson lofts. Topics on the bill: • Indie Publishing • A Tree Grows in Brooklyn: 1912 to 2012 • Slugs! • Edith Wilson: Our First Female President • The Novartis/RFID Scandal • TBD Presentation Party Night is a lecture series that combines a love of community, education, and drinking. We offer the chance for individuals to share a short presentation on any topic and spark group discussion. The evening will consist of 6 brief/educational/entertaining presentations followed by Q&A, with free food and beer while it lasts. The event is traditionally held potluck style. Bring a snack to share and BYOB if you can. Let me stress that THIS IS A FREE EVENT and no one is required to bring a damn thing if they don’t feel like it. Come join us for a night of drinking with friends and learning from your peers — there’s nothing else quite like it!

A group show, THE CAVE will be presented at Frontrunner Gallery March 16th-31st. Produced by Corinne Beardsley, 20 artists and performers are building a cave out of cardboard and wheat pasting newsprint to paint, draw, install sculpture, projections, soundscapes, and host performances of music and theater. The show will inhabit two spaces at 59 Franklin St.- the 400 sq. foot gallery, and it’s project space in the deep caverns of the building. The audience will discover the dark spaces using crafted flashlight torches.

NY Studio Gallery is pleased to present Al Wadzinski’s third solo show in New York. Wadzinski’s False Idols refer to the predominantly Judeo-Christian concept of idolatry, the worship of a physical object as a god. Here these carefully assembled icons are comprised of humanity’s abandoned cast-offs, the remnants of our bloated consumer culture now repurposed as inert fetish objects. The centerpiece of the exhibition revolves around a massive golden calf, referencing the Old Testament story, but this god-proxy’s body is a shopping cart filled with gold-painted bones, its undeniably bovine head an amalgam of odd parts ranging from boots to a Christmas tree stand. (READ MORE.)

LZ Project Space is pleased to present Convergent Evolution, a solo sculpture exhibition by Deborah Simon. Inspired by viewers miscatagorization of Simon’s animal sculptures, she began to group together her pieces along those lines – also known as convergent evolution. This exhibit contains both king penguins and northern fur seals, both animals that have arrived at seemingly alike solutions for locomotion despite coming from different and unrelated ancestries. Simon’s animals float between taxidermy, toy, and art object; their life-sized bodies represent hours of meticulous multi- processed work in the form of sewing, molding, and painting of their almost ethereal clay faces. (READ MORE.)

After the United States detonated an atomic bomb at Hiroshima on August 6, 1945, the U.S. government restricted the circulation of images of the bomb’s deadly effect. President Truman dispatched some 1,150 military personnel and civilians, including photographers, to record the destruction as part of the United States Strategic Bombing Survey. The goal of the Survey’s Physical Damage Division was to photograph and analyze methodically the impact of the atomic bomb on various building materials surrounding the blast site, the first “Ground Zero.” The haunting, once-classified images of absence and annihilation formed the basis for civil defense architecture in the United States. This exhibition includes approximately 60 contact prints drawn from a unique archive of more than 700 photographs in the collection of the International Center of Photography. The exhibition is organized Erin Barnett, Assistant Curator of Collections. (READ MORE.)

Ducks are sometimes confused with several types of unrelated water birds with similar forms, such as loons or divers, grebes, gallinules, and coots. The word duck (from Anglo-Saxon duce), meaning the bird, came from the verb “to duck” (from Anglo-Saxon supposed *ducan) meaning “to bend down low as if to get under something” or “to dive”, because of the way many species in the dabbling duck group feed by upending (compare Dutch duiken, German tauchen = “to dive”). Duck That were once seen in the same room as Paul Whiteman, although they’d deny it if asked. Angela Sawyer, electronics and game calls, etc… Josh Jefferson, reeds and game calls, etc… Steve Norton, reeds and game calls, etc…

Then Starting at 9, The Super Coda welcomes Yva Lass Vegass, Tooth and Wail, and The Molasses Gospel! They are all touring together. Come Support!

For over a century, Carnegie Hall rented affordable studios to residents like Marlon Brando, Paddy Chayefsky and Isadora Duncan. As a privileged tenant himself, director Astor began to record his neighbors, witnesses to decades of artistic history. But when the landlord served everyone with eviction notices for a conversion to offices, his project became a chronicle of the battle to save the apartments and their rich heritage. (READ MORE.)

The Witch’s DungeonCortlandt Hull with figure of his great uncle, Henry Hull, “The Werewolf Of London”

Friday, May 20th may be a dark and stormy night. Brave souls normally catch the coach at midnight from the Borgo Pass to access the lawless and far off lands of Bristol, CT, spoken about in hushed tones as the home of the Witch’s Dungeon. But on this rare occasion the stars have aligned and like the Baba Yaga’s chicken-footed cabin, the Witch’s Dungeon is coming to Observatory! (READ MORE.)

As part of the New York Public Library’s centenary celebration weekend, the Believermagazine will host “QNA: A Roundtable Discussion on the Art of the Interview,” featuring:

DICK CAVETT, legendary host of The Dick Cavett Show, which aired on ABC from 1968 to 1975 and on public television from 1977 to 1982, and author, most recently, of Talk Show: Confrontations, Pointed Commentary, and Off-Screen Secrets.

CLAUDIA DREIFUS, interviewer for the “Conversation with…” column in the Tuesday science section of the New York Times, former Playboy interviewer, and author of two books of interviews. She’s known for her unusual Q-and-A’s with heads of state, Nobel Prize winners, and quirky engineers. She was called by Dan Rather “one of the world’s great interviewers.” Her latest publication, with Andrew Hacker, is Higher Education?

KENNETH GOLDSMITH, editor of I’ll Be Your Mirror: The Selected Andy Warhol Interviews, and author of the underground classic Soliloquy, an unedited, 487-page transcript of every word, um, and yeah that came from his mouth during one week of his life.

LORIN STEIN, new editor of The Paris Review, the beloved source for some of the most in-depth interviews with writers published in the English language since the 1950s, collected in editions such as Writers At Work and The Paris Review Interviews series, he’s also the translator of Gregoire Bouillier’s The Mystery Guest.

There will be a short reading of a self-interview by the author and Saturday Night Live writer SIMON RICH, to be performed by actor PAULO COSTANZO, (of Royal Pains) followed by a presentation of playwright Darren O’Donnell’s relational theater piece, Q+A, in which the audience becomes both the interviewer and interviewee.

The event will be hosted by Believer interviews editors Sheila Heti and Ross Simonini.

Part two is more oriented toward cyclical issues of consumption and spectacle. It can be seen as the crescendo of the exhibition. Here, destruction assumes the more aggressive and dramatic character one might normally associate with it.

Among the works that more directly engage the question of consumption can be found Johannes Vogl’s absurd, homemade contraption Untitled (Machine To Produce Jam Breads, 2007) which produces pieces of bread with jam on them and thus addresses questions of overproduction and consequently waste. (READ MORE.)

Morgan Lehman Gallery is pleased to present, UNREST, a solo exhibition of new works by Andrew Schoultz. This is the artist’s third show with Morgan Lehman Gallery.

Andrew Schoultz’s UNREST stems from the artist’s continuing interest in issues of global turmoil and societal angst. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, The Japanese Earthquakes and the BP oil spill all fuel this new body of work. Rather than depict literal narratives of these events, Schoultz captures their essence using an ever-expanding arsenal of pictorial symbols. Billowing clouds of smoke create an “all-over” surface reminiscent of abstract expressionism and Op-art. These stylized clouds both unify the composition and veil the reality of the horrors depicted in the background. The obscuring impact that these clouds has on the images they hide may indicate the frustration Schoultz has with the partisan and misleading journalism the press has in disseminating information to the public. Other oft-repeated symbols include crumbling and exploding brick structures and monuments, the rearing horse, the all-seeing Masonic eye, and a lit candle set against green, yellow and red camouflaged backgrounds. The lit candle – a universal sign of hope and optimism-suggests that even in uncertain times the human spirit is nothing if not optimistic. These recurring symbols function as visual cues for a loose narrative the artist has constructed through previous bodies of work. Out of this narrative, Schoultz forms an historical construct that melds contemporary calamitous events with the broad sweep of Western civilization. (READ MORE.)

I am essentially driven by libidinal and anti-normative desires, coupled with sensitive and concerted attention to materials and to the mechanisms of visual perception. The objects I create both resonate with heroic and cynical strains of object making and seek to undermine these very strains with humility and sincerity.

Each work or series of works is created as a compulsive reaction to the burn of being alive and the spilling over of emotions that accompany the dogged difficulty of managing life. I intend to create visual signs or experiences that approximate the shocks and waves of living.

John McWhinnie at Glenn Horowitz Bookseller is pleased to announce our next exhibition, David Levinthal: Black Again. The show opens with a reception on May 19th, from 6-8pm, and runs through July 2nd, 2011. The exhibition is drawn from David Levinthal’s project Blackface, dating from 1995-1998, featuring blackface Polaroids and the original memorabilia, drawn from the artist’s personal collection, that are the Polaroid’s subject matter.

Levinthal’s collecting of black memorabilia evolved into Blackface, a stimulating and controversial body of work. The title, according to Levinthal, “makes reference to the many facades, poise and physicality of these figures.” The title is also taken from the name of a journal of a black film-making company and is a term referring to both blacks and whites. Traditionally associated with minstrelsy, these images were used to perpetuate negative stereotypes. Levinthal’s work was originally intended to be exhibited at Philadelphia’s ICA in 1997. However, the show was cancelled when it became a cause célèbre as a result of its controversial subject-matter. Subsequently, images from the series were exhibited at the International Center of Photography and at Janet Borden, Inc. in New York. This is the first time that the artist has exhibited this body of work with the original figurines and advertising that inspired the portraits. (READ MORE.)

Destroy All MonstersSunday, May 22, 2011
12:00 PM to 4:00 PMVideo screening in the first-floor Main Gallery and 3pm book signingwith Cary Loren.In conjunction with the new publication, Destroy All Monsters Magazine 1976-1979, published by Primary Information, MoMA PS1 and D.A.P./Distributed Art Publishers present a day-long screening of Shake a Lizard Tail, or Rust Belt Rump, a film created by the band for their 1996 Japanese tour. The film is a collage of horror exploitation videos, Detroit “Dance City” techno dancers, and late night WGPR television commercials of the 1980s. The commercials feature local Detroit landmarks such as Miley and Miley’s Shrimp Shack, the Club Watts Mozambique ladies club, and various funeral homes.

In 1973, the Detroit band Destroy All Monsters was a wild and reckless synthesis of psychedelia, proto-punk, heavy metal, noise and performance art. The collective hailed from Ann Arbor, Michigan, and consisted of Cary Loren, Mike Kelley, Niagara and Jim Shaw (with later members including Ron Asheton of the Stooges, Michael Davis of the MC5 and the Miller brothers of Mission of Burma). (READ MORE.)

Gamelan Dharma Swara w/ Momenta Quartet and Shahzad IsmailySun., May 22, 2011 / 7:00 PM
Gamelan Dharma Swara is dedicated to the study, performance and creation of traditional and new works for Balinese gamelan. Through performance and education, we bring Balinese gamelan to the widest audience and participant base possible, and we endeavor to perform with spirit, dedication and gratitude. We are a coalition of master Balinese artists and leading American composers, musicians and dancers. In residence at the Indonesian Consulate in New York, Dharma Swara regularly performs for a wide and multicultural audience in the greater New York City area. We have collaborated with Indonesiaʼs leading artists and have performed in the areaʼs top venues including: Lincoln Center, Asia Society, Japan Society, New York Philharmonic, the Met, Brooklyn Museum, Symphony Space, LaMama, and Columbia, Princeton, NYU and Yale universities. In 2010 the ensemble was invited to perform as the first non-Balinese group in the annual gong kebyar competitions at the Bali Arts Festival. (READ MORE.)
Click here to see an article on Gamelan Dharma Swara from the NYTimes

A green art workshop with artist and Hollow Earth Society co-founder Ethan Gould
Date: Sunday, May 22Time: 2:00 PM – 4:00 PM
Admission: $15
Presented by the Hollow Earth Society
Part one of a four-part series

Post-apocalyptic arts & crafts survival skills workshops, you say!? That’s right: Creative-making for the improvisational, post-industrial future (and present). When the apocalypse comes, these definitely won’t be the first things you’ll need to know… but they’ll be on the list! In this workshop series, learn how to make beautiful objects you’ll actually use out of materials that would otherwise go to waste. (READ MORE.)